Untitled,

1957

When he died in an automobile accident in 1965, the sculptor and painter David Smith left behind vast numbers of drawings, which he succinctly categorized as "studies for sculpture, sometimes what sculpture is, sometimes what sculpture can never be." One of the most versatile and prolific of the Abstract Expressionists, Smith was also a passionate advocate for the importance of drawing, which he expounded on throughout his career, referring to it as the "life force of the artist." Ranging from preparatory notebook sketches to autonomous works such as this one, Smith’s drawings document his continuous attempt to unite painting and sculpture, or as he put it "to beat either one" — ­utilizing the pictorial plane as a point of departure for his emphatically frontal yet three-dimensional constructions. Executed at the height of his short-lived career, this monumental work belongs to a large group of highly gestural and expressive brush drawings that were made in Smith’s studio at Bolton Landing in upstate New York, and that derived inspiration from Japanese calligraphy. Wielding a large soft-bristled brush with force and intensity, the artist attained a fluidity and richly lustrous texture by adding egg yolk to the dark black ink, thereby creating arbitrary tonal variations within each brushstroke. Like most of his other calligraphic drawings from the 1950s, this example is characteristically rectangular in format and horizontal in composition, evoking the wide span and pictorial dynamics of earlier bird and landscape constructions. The vigorous vertical shapes also closely reflect or anticipate the figural series Smith was creating concurrently, such as the Tanktotems, Forgings, and Sentinels. While many of the brush drawings are purely abstract, this one is anthropomorphic in character. The bristling and fluttering forms intermingle and clash with one another like shadow puppets, suggesting a tautly choreographed confrontation of male and female forces whose linear arabesques are pierced by the whiteness of the paper, which also serves to give weight and gravity to the floating brushstrokes.